With Gov. David Paterson promising a new day in Albany, is it too much to ask for a rethinking of his prede cessor’s feckless energy policies?

The signs aren’t good.

The state’s energy situation under Gov. Spitzer could be likened to a slow-motion train wreck. As Max Schulz notes on the opposite page, New Yorkers pay 66 percent more for energy than the national average – the third-highest rates in the country. New supplies could ease costs.

City residents, meanwhile, pay far more than even that – and Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC anticipates a 30 percent spike in Gotham’s peak energy demand over the next 25 years.

Translation: New York needs a lot more juice – and soon.

Yet Paterson, like Spitzer before him, seems unwilling to stand up to the myriad not-in-my-back-yard interests that have blocked nearly all attempts to boost the state’s output.

And to make matters worse, state officials are pushing ahead with efforts to shut down Westchester’s Indian Point nuclear power plant, a source of some 25 percent of New York City’s juice.

Paterson remains totally committed, his office says, to Spitzer’s request that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission not renew the plant owner’s licenses – set to expire in 2013 and 2015 – to run the two reactors on the site.

So how does the gov propose to recoup Indian Point’s 2,000 megawatts of power?

Not well.

For starters, there’s Spitzer’s laughably ambitious plan for New York to cut its energy consumption 15 percent by 2015 (see Mike’s projections, above).

Throw in a handful of proposed upstate wind farms and natural-gas plants, a few more power lines to Jersey – and voila!

What, Dave worry?

Never mind that New York – and Gotham, especially – will likely need all that and Indian Point in the coming decades: The plant remains the city’s closest, cheapest, cleanest and most reliable source of energy.

Plus, it’s already there.

That’s no small consideration either, given the bureaucratic horrors that attend any attempt at new power generation in the state.

The truth is that no one likes unsightly plants or power lines going up in their neighborhoods – especially if it’s something that still sparks public paranoia as much as nuclear energy.

And spooked locals form a far more concentrated interest than the mass of ratepayers who merely see their energy bills tick up yet again.

But New York needs the energy. That’s why Article X of the Public Service Law created a streamlined approval process for power plants – under which Albany had the right to supercede local opposition to new plants.

Indeed, since Article X expired in 2003, energy investors have far less incentive to gamble on the state.

Paterson – like Spitzer before him – says he supports reviving Article X, but it remains to be seen whether he wants any new law to protect nuclear and coal-fired plants, as the old one did. (Spitzer, in a sop to the greens, favored a more restricted version.)

But Paterson still has a chance to make a new beginning – if he’s willing to speak hard truth to the NIMBY lobby.

New York’s ratepayers – and those who depend on the state’s future prosperity – would sure be grateful.